LINKS I HAVE LIKED—
and you might well like them too...
- Company, state and national archives, valuable links for research in business history, part of the European Guide on Banking and Business Archives on the Internet. You can access this collection by following the link on the bottom of the homepage of the Guide (´International Links on Business History´) at: http://www.euroarchiveguide.org/
- British Telecom history http://innovate.bt.com/past/history/index.htm
- British Telecom Archives
Telephones
- Hittfeld telephone museum, Germany (some phones for sale too) http://home.t-online.de/home/telefonmuseum/
- New England museum of telephony http://ellsworthme.org/ringring/
- Old Telephone Company (British dealer site) http://158.43.192.14/town/avenue/gf54/index.shtml
- Old telephones in North America, with many, many links) http://www.cybercomm.com/~chuck/phones.html
- Ove's telephones (superb Swedish collection) http://home3.swipnet.se/~w-38835/indexeng.htm
- Peter Walker's telephone collection (a virtual museum of great completeness) http://dialspace.dial.pipex.com/town/plaza/ah91/
- Phoneco (American dealer site, great for spare parts and cloth-covered cords) http://www.phonecoinc.com/
- Tony Fisher http://dcpu1.cs.york.ac.uk:6666/fisher/telecom
- Tribute To The Telephone (a mind-bogglingly complete and superb array of material) http://www.telephonetribute.com/
- US Army Signal Corps telephones http://members.tripod.com/~phonelady/militaryphones.htm
Exchanges
- Cedar Knoll T&T (American telephones, mainly PABX and railway, and master clocks too) www.cedarknolltelephone.com
- Ferrymead museum, with its superb Western Electric Rotary exchange http://members.xoom.com/ferrymead/
- Kirt's phones http://users.erols.com/kirt/
- Light Straw http://www.light-straw.co.uk/ate
- Polish telephone exchanges http://www.elka.pw.edu.pl/fundusz/miernik/telecomm/index.html
- Rob Grant's telephone pages (quirky and attractive) http://www.mcsnail.mcmail.com/telecom/telecom.htm
- Seattle vintage telephone museum (with a Panel exchange and more) http://www.scn.org/tech/telmuseum/
- The Strowger aficionado's site (devoted mainly British exchanges) http://web.ukonline.co.uk/uax13
- Strowger Pages http://www.seg.co.uk/telecomm/index.htm
- Telephone exchanges of the south Midlands http://www.evenlode.demon.co.uk/exchanges.html
- We have a fully operational Strowger Telephone switching system, believed to be to LAST operating commercial system in the USA.
- http://www.shohola.com/kd3fg
Aural delights
- Phone trips (the US telephone system as it was in all its glory) http://www.wideweb.com/phonetrips/index2.html
- Phone World (another superb American site) http://phworld.tal-on.com/
- The sounds of mechanical switching http://www.innoconcepts.net/nts/client/
- TWPYHR (US tones and announcements recorded for posterity) http://twpyhr.usuck.com/
- Canadian tones http://www.artofhacking.com/sounds
Last year I did a comprehensive trawl through the POEEJ (and its successor, the British Telecommunications Engineering Journal) for stuff likely to be of interest, covering from POEEJ Vol.32 to BTEJ Vol.10 inclusive. (approx 1939 - 1992). I have listed articles relating to cable tunnels, the PO railway, submarine cables, microwave stations, VLF and troposcatter. Since then, I have added a handful of references from other electrical engineering journals as I have come across them, and the list can be seen at: http://www.lamont.me.uk/misc/poeej/
Richard Lamont, richard@lamont.me.uk
British Isles
- Guernsey Telecoms museum http://www.guernseytelecoms.com/mus_index.html
- Milton Keynes telephone museum www.mkheritage.co.uk/TTM
Europe
- The Telephone Museum - Hellerup, Denmark
- The Dutch On-Line Telephone Museum
- The Telephone Museum - Hittfeld, Germany
- Norsk Telemuseum - Norway
North America
- Alder Grove Telephone Museum - British Columbia, Canada
- Cyber Telephone Museum - Oregon
- Georgia Rural Telephone Museum
- Roseville Telephone Museum - California
- Telephone Historical Centre - Edmonton, Canada
- Telephone Pioneer Museum - Nebraska
- Vintage Telephone Equipment Museum - Seattle
Australasia
- Vintage Telephone Equipment Museum - Melbourne
- Antique Telephone Collectors Association, USA http://www.cybercomm.com/~chuck/atca.html
- Post Office Vehicle Club (UK) http://www.povehclub.org.uk/
- Telecommunications Heritage Group, UK http://www.thg.org.uk
- Telephone Collectors International, USA http://www.singingwires.org/
- Telephone Pioneers, USA http://www.telephone-pioneers.org
- Antique Telephone Collectors Association, USA http://www.cybercomm.com/~chuck/atca.html
CANADA
- AT&T Canada http://www.attcanada.com/
- Bell Canada http://www.bell.ca/
- Lucent Technologies http://www.lucent.ca/
- Sprint Canada http://www.sprintcanada.ca/
- Teleglobe Business Services http://www.teleglobe.ca/
- Telus Communications http://www.telus.com/
- TigerTel Services http://www.tigertel.com/
UK
- British Telecom http://www.bt.com/
- How phones work http://www.geek.org.uk/phila/nd/PHOWOR.TXT
- The uk.telecom FAQ http://reality.memex.co.uk/staff/peter/uk.telecom/minifaq.html
- Payphones of the World http://www.2600.com/phones/
- World phone plugs illustrated http://kropla.com/phones2.htm and www.teleadapt.com/web/destinations/destination
- Morsum Magnificat, devoted to Morse communication http://www.morsum.demon.uk/
- Telegram collecting http://www.omen.com.au/~larry/tgram.html
- Vintage telegraph keys http://www.chss.montclair.edu/~pererat/telegraph.html
Auction sites, for obtaining old telephone instruments, ephemera, other hardware and so on
- http://www.ebay.com (North American site)
- http://www.ebay.uk (UK site)
- http://www.ebay.de (German site_
- http://www.ebay.au (Australian site)
- http://www.amazon.com (fewer auctions than eBay)
- http://auctions.yahoo.co.uk (fewer auctions than eBay)
- You can also peruse Loot magazine online, at www.loot.com
Happy hunting!
- http://www.antiques.tm.fr (large number of useful links on collecting hobbies in general)
- www.auction-search.net (information on collectibles)
- www.collectat.co.uk (links collectors and collectibles)
- http://sammlerweb.2000pages.com (similar affair in Germany)
Other Internet resources for telecomms
Telecomms (Usenet)
- alt.dcom.telecom.ip (occasional historical discussions)
- comp.dcom telecom.tech (ditto)
- uk.telecom.moderated (ditto)
Telecomms (reflectors)
To subscribe to the Strowger mailing list (discussion of old exchanges and telephones) send a blank e-mail to strowger-subscribe@yahoogroups.com and put SUBSCRIBE into the subject field. Your request will be confirmed.
To subscribe to the Singing Wires, alias TCI List (mainly Americans buying and selling telephones but a fair sprinkling of more general chat on old telephones as well) send a blank e-mail to: singingwires-subscribe@yahoogroups.com Your request will be confirmed.
To subscribe to the Telephone Numbering discussion (fairly academic discussion of national and global dialling codes) mailing list, send a blank e-mail to: <telnum-l-@mjrdom.else.net.
What's all this Usenet and list server stuff?
Newsgroups are mostly part of Usenet, which predates the World Wide Web and possibly even the Internet itself. Anyone whose ISP (Internet service provider) offers a news service can read and participate in newsgroups. Listservs (short for list servers) are private affairs, sometimes run on a financial subscription basis, and enable one person (the list owner) to send information by e-mail automatically to a large number of interested people. A variant called a reflector allows any in the group to send replies, comments and new messages that are 'reflected' to all members of the group.